When Your Mortality Calls, Will You Be Home?

This posting is a reprint of an article which MORE Magazine printed in June 2009. 

When my mortality called, I refused to answer.

When she phoned again, I told her she had the wrong number.

Like the most persistent junk callers, she rang me yet again and this time left a message: “You have Parkinson’s disease.” I hung up, hoping she was merely an obscene caller.

When she phoned once more, I told this nuisance caller politely but firmly to check directory assistance because she must have me mixed up with another Peggy van Hulsteyn, some frail widow in declining health. I was the healthy Peggy van Hulsteyn, fifty-something, with boundless energy, an exciting writing career, and a wonderful marriage. Having a degenerative illness was not on my to-do list.

Getting to Yes

"Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery." 

                                                      Jane Austen

As a humor writer, I like to make people laugh.  As an optimistic person who happens to be a  reporter, I like to report good news.  If I had my way, all my writing would sound like a compilation of Mark Twain, P.G. Wodehouse and Erma Bombeck.  I am an admirer of Gilbert and Sullivan operas, Noel Coward plays, and snappy Cole Porter tunes.  Nedra, my British chum, describes my writing as "champagne bubbles, light, frothy and charming."

But as much as I always  wanted to play the part of  the delightful, bratty (it's-all -about-me)  Eloise  whose mantra is  "I -can-do-whatever-I please cause  I'm Eloise,"  I'm from a different tribe altogether, one far far away from blond blue eyed six-year-old girls who live at the Plaza Hotel.

My DNA  is not  programmed for being Eloise (who I suspect is Episcopalian) or one of the upper crust in the delightful P.G. Wodehouse tomes.  These characters are charming  twits of the finest order. Their biggest concerns are centered on  the minutiae of the  day--- episode after episode about stolen cow creamers and  house  parties filled with bickering amusing aunts and divine French food.

Nice work if you can get it but these choices weren't available to me,a Jewish girl in rural Indiana.  Tuna noodle casserole was the Hoosier state's most exotic fare and Jewish humor was more like angst, about as far from crisp British subtlety as possible.